


The House That Howard Built

by nerdyvixen



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, Post-Canon, also ft. howard strand (derogatory), bilocation as a way of avoiding talking about your daddy issues, everyone gets a gold star only it's not nearly as awesome as one might expect, see also: how you know it's a tbt fic that katie wrote (spoilers: people are covered in stars), the aftereffects of an apocalypse are a not-so-fun party trick
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-11
Updated: 2021-01-11
Packaged: 2021-03-15 12:07:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,976
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28688376
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nerdyvixen/pseuds/nerdyvixen
Summary: They made it through the end of the world.Unfortunately, that was the easy part.ORAlex and Richard discover that involuntary bilocation is not, in fact, a decent substitute for actually talking about your feelings.
Relationships: Alex Reagan/Richard Strand
Comments: 12
Kudos: 13





	The House That Howard Built

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Lydia (lydiabell)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/lydiabell/gifts).



The end of the world is averted with far less pomp and cosmic horror than Alex expects. It has its price, of course; Richard has several broken ribs and a particularly nasty cut down his left temple that will scar, while Alex herself boasts a ruptured eardrum, a sprained wrist, and stars in her veins. The Swiss hospital fixes them as best they can but don’t seem to notice the last. Richard does. He doesn’t comment on them, but she watches him chart their slow eddies beneath her skin on their flight back to Seattle two months later.

They have nightmares, the both of them, and she knows this is only to be expected. They manage sleeping apart for two nights when they get back to the States (if that fitful attempt at rest can be called “sleeping”), but in the end, when they’re done pretending that this is something that anyone else could ever hope to understand the way they do, they come back to the house.

There are less ghosts there than Alex has ever thought there’d be, though it breathes in time with memories Richard still doesn’t dare touch. Howard walks the hallways--or, at least, some version of Howard, or some ghost of Howard, or some memory of Howard, less of _father_ and more of _the man, the myth, the legend_ , though even that is tempered with a heavy dose of distance instead of idolatry. She doesn’t want to think too hard about what it means that Richard had been more eager to face down a primordial goddess and a man hellbent on erasing humanity from the face of the earth than to confront his father’s sins. He’s grown too accustomed to carrying them on as his own, of course, and she knows this, but it doesn’t erase the way the house breathes the way Howard breathed. It doesn’t shake the feeling that she’s watching them through someone else’s eyes as they silently crawl into Richard’s big bed to finally get some sleep.

“You don’t have to come back to work this soon, Alex,” Nic says, and she blinks and stares at the slope of Richard’s back as he dreams.

“Alex?” Nic says, and she blinks again and stares at her best friend in his office.

“I know,” she says, and next to her, Richard sighs in his sleep and rolls closer to her, tugging his navy blue duvet with him. Cool air brushes against her bared calf, and she glances down reflexively at the stars there. Between the goosebumps, she can chart constellations under her skin, distant ones that have no name in any tongue she knows.

“I mean, I wouldn’t expect anyone to come back after even a couple months, what with...you know, everything.” There’s a bead of sweat along Nic’s temple, and as he speaks, he gets up and turns down the thermostat. “Sorry, I thought we weren’t gonna get that heat wave--I guess I was wrong. But Alex, you really should take more time.”

“Alex?” Richard mumbles. She shifts closer to him and brushes his dark hair away from his forehead, being mindful of the silvery scar that looks a lot more badass than he wants to admit it does. “Where did you go?”

“I’m right here,” she says, and Nic frowns.

“I didn’t mean to offend you,” he apologizes as he sits back down at his desk. She watches his fingers twitch as he stops himself from reaching out for her hand. There are some comforts she won’t allow him anymore, not after everything he’s done and been forced to do and failed to do over the past three years. “I just...I worry about you. You’re not yourself.”

“You look like you’re somewhere else,” Richard says muzzily. He reaches out and drifts his fingertips across her cheekbone. “I can see your starlight, but you’re not here.”

“I’m right here, Richard,” she protests.

“Alex?” Nic sounds panicked in a way she hasn’t heard since they discovered the axis mundi was in the studio. “Alex, Dr. Strand’s not here--he’s at his father’s house still, and he asked that we give him some space, remember?”

She can feel the stars move under her skin, not unpleasantly, as Richard’s touch becomes more purposeful. It’s intimate, yes, but not sexual; they want, and they have wanted, but there hadn’t been time. Now there are too many memories watching, but he traces a slow path over her cheek and over her jaw, his fingers ghosting over her mouth until she parts her lips to let the light out.

“Oh,” says Richard, and his tone is full of wonder and want and fear, “ _there_ you are.”

“Alex?” 

She squeezes her eyes shut. Beneath her hands is the well-worn upholstery of Nic’s office armchair. Beneath her hand is Richard’s dark hair. She can see starlight. She can smell the breakroom coffee. She can smell the clean, woodsy scent of Richard’s favored soap. She can feel Nic’s worry, Richard’s wonder, and ghosts from the past watching, watching.

“You’re right, Nic,” she says against her closed lids. “I...I need to take more time. I’ll call you later and get the details figured out, okay?”

She opens her eyes to see Richard staring at her. “So,” he says, “it’s happening to you, too.”

* * * * *

She’s not sure how she gets from the office to Howard’s house, which should alarm her more than it does. There’s the sensation of traveling, the susurrus of late-morning traffic, and the certainty that she’d almost hit a pothole on I-5, but she’s also deeply certain that Richard had held her while she cried and shook in fear. Memories of both haunt her, but that doesn’t make it any easier to figure out which one is real.

She takes a deep breath and stares at the front door. The knob is too bright, really, as are the numbers trailing against the frame, and in the unseasonable warmth, they almost seem to sweat. Her palms are, definitely.

“Are you at the door right now?” Richard asks her, and she nods against his chest, her fingers bunching in the soft fabric of his faded gray Yale shirt.

“I’m here,” she calls out as she knocks-- _and why the hell am I knocking? I have a key. I know this is unlocked._

But she hears the knock from a distance, too, muffled as it is by the duvet he’d tugged over both of them. She hears her own voice call out and shrinks away from it. “What’s happening to us?”

“It’s Tiamat,” Richard says from behind her, and she startles, clutching at the strap of the messenger bag across her chest.

“Where did you even _come_ from?” she demands. 

He sighs and rakes a hand through his hair, almost dislodging his glasses. “I left earlier this morning. I wanted to get you coffee--we’d used the last of it before we left for Geneva, and if you were dealing with this, too, I wanted you to have it.” He holds up one of her reusable shopping bags as evidence. “I just got back. Traffic was terrible. There was an accident on I-5.”

“But you’re right here,” she whispers, curling deeper into the duvet, and his arms tighten around her.

“And I’m right here,” he tells her wearily as he reaches around her to open the front door. The cuff of his spruce-colored henley falls back, exposing the blue, star-studded veins in his wrist. “It seems to be a consequence of being the Mantle.”

“Richard…” She brushes her fingers against his wrist, feels his pulse jump at her touch, and forces him to meet her eyes. His own are the same starry blue as his veins. “What consequence? What’s happening?”

“It’s involuntary bilocation,” he says, mostly into her hair even as she curls tighter into him, her face tucked into the crook of his neck until all she can smell is his soap. They’d both had enough of saltwater and scrubbed harder than strictly necessary to get the echoes of it out of their skin. “At least, it’s involuntary on my part. Once we got back from Geneva, I...that first night. When you weren’t here.”

“I was at Nic’s.”

“Right.” He puts one hand on the small of her back to guide her into the house before him, then shuts the door, and the sounds of the outside world--the birds, the wind, the insects--vanish to be replaced by the held breath of the ghosts that she knows he’s never been able to admit to. “And so was I.”

“But you were here,” she tells him numbly as he makes his way into the kitchen and puts the kettle on for coffee and tea. “I texted you all night because I couldn’t sleep. You sent me that stupid selfie.”

He pauses in the middle of prepping her French press. “Stupid?”

She laughs, broken and tearful but still amused. “It’s the front-facing, below-the-chin, _is this thing on?_ angle that every single over-40 man puts on his dating profile. I wouldn’t have been surprised if the next one you sent me had a fish in it.”

“I don’t understand what a fish has to do with anything.”

“I’ll tell you later.”

He hums, his fingers running up and down her spine in a bare attempt at comfort. “Later. I’ll hold you to that.”

She nods and wraps her arms tighter around him. If she can tell herself that it’s just them, just in his bed, then maybe it will be more real than whatever he’s telling her. “I didn’t see you.” Her voice is muffled from where she has her face pressed into his shoulder. Everything around her is soft and warm. Everything around her smells like cedar and oakmoss. “I didn’t see anything. Nic’s dog was staring into the corner all night, but there wasn’t anything there.”

But even as she says that, she knows she’s lying. She remembers that night, Nic’s living room illuminated by the blue glow of his TV, the shadows on the wall morphing and shifting. His dog had stared into the corner, yes, but she had, too, hard enough until she was certain she’d seen a tall, dark, shadowy figure with too-long fingers and impossibly starry blue eyes. 

Richard takes a deep breath and lets it out slowly; she can feel his ribcage expanding against her own. “That was me, Alex. I was there. I didn’t want to call out to you or scare Nic’s dog--it was so late, and I didn’t know how to explain how I’d gotten there.”

“But we stopped Tiamat,” she protests as the kettle shrieks. “We _won_. I don’t understand.”

“I don’t understand, either,” he answers quietly, removing the kettle and then pouring the water into the French press. “I haven’t found anything in my father’s journals or in any of our research. I don’t think he expected me to survive.”

In the kitchen, his back is to her as he busies himself with making her coffee in lieu of confronting his very first ghost. In his bed, his shoulders tense beneath her desperate hands. "He was your father,” she says. “Surely he didn't raise you just to be some sort of sacrificial lamb."

"Isn't that how the story goes?" The sunlight turns his edges translucent. The dimness in his room turns him to shadow. "Isaac. Iphigenia. So much better on an altar than on the family tree."

“Richard…”

“No matter.” He drums his fingertips against the counter. “I noticed it when we got back to Seattle. I felt like you were calling me. I wanted...I didn’t want to be _here_. Not after all we went through. Everything felt like my father, and I couldn’t--Alex, you saw the kind of man he was, to keep company with someone like Warren for so long.”

It’s a peculiar mixture of past and present tense, the way he speaks of Howard, and Alex tucks herself under his chin, letting him roll onto his back in his bed until she’s half on top of him. He needs the weight of her, leaden and holding down his universe, and while everything she thought she understood has suddenly changed, nothing feels like it’s changed more than that: he needs her, and he is letting her know he does. The loose collar of his Yale shirt has dipped low; she reaches out with trembling fingers and traces along his clavicle.

“You’re not your father,” she says as he pours her a cup of coffee and sets it in front of her. “You know that, right?”

He’s silent.

“You’re not, Richard.” Her fingers trail up his throat, and she watches stars congregate at her touch. She drags her hand lower, over his chest to rest at his heart, and the gathering stars flicker with his pulse. “You didn’t sacrifice your family. You tried to do what was best by your daughter. You tried to keep me safe as much as you could. You’re _not_ your father.”

“I abandoned my daughter. I lied to you.” He shifts a little so he can look at her, starry-eyed and sleep-rumpled but still undeniably himself, and the usual urge to either throttle him or kiss him paces in her ribs. “I lied about _everything_ , Alex. I put you in danger--”

“Hey.” She waits until he looks up from his perusal of the steam curling out of his tea. “Richard. Please. Like you needed to push me into this. I went willingly. I bought the tickets, remember? I’ve never met a danger I didn’t like.”

“You’ve met plenty of danger you didn’t like,” he disagrees as he presses a kiss against her hair, and she files that gesture away to dissect later, once they’ve figured out what the hell is happening _now_. “That housekeeper. Warren.” He pauses, and she watches regret bob in his throat as he swallows. “Me.”

“Do you really want to get into how I feel about you right now?” she asks softly. Her coffee mug is too hot against her palms, but she doesn’t dare let go. 

He laughs, huffy, light, hers, and leans against the counter with his own too-hot mug in his hands. “I think trying to parse why we’re both bilocating will be less nuanced,” he says.

“What if we just…” She worms her way out of his arms and sits up in bed, and for a moment, her head spins. She can smell the coffee from downstairs, the scent cutting sharply through the woodsy fog of soap and laundry detergent. “If we went downstairs. Do you think it might…?”

“Create a paradox? End the universe?” But he sits up, too, and in the kitchen, he offers her a smile that burns her skin more than the coffee mug. “Stop me from wanting to persuade you to stay in bed all day?”

She feels her cheeks flush twice. “I thought we weren’t getting into that.”

He flushes, too, and scrubs his hand over his face. In spite of everything, she feels a little frisson of pride at knowing they are, at least, on the same unspoken page in that regard _finally_. "It's--I know this isn't the time. It's just…"

"Simpler?"

He opens his mouth, shuts it, then tries again. "Familiar."

She stares at him. “Familiar?”

Sitting up in bed with him is somehow more vulnerable than laying curled up in his arms. From the stiff way he holds himself, he feels the same way. For a moment, they look at each other, dappled in starlight in the soft shadows of his room--and then she blinks, and she’s alone in his bed.

“Come back to me,” he calls out from the kitchen, and she feels a swarm of warmth and motion pricking into her skin like needle-winged flies before she blinks again and finds herself sitting at the kitchen table with mug-reddened palms.

“I think we’re going to need some help with this,” she tells him, trying not to dwell on how strange it feels to be in one place only, and even as he pulls a face, she knows he’s going to agree.

* * * * *

Four cups of coffee, two cups of tea, and one more involuntary bilocation later, they’ve narrowed down their options to three: searching the house high and low to see if Howard had squirreled away any research somewhere, calling Tannis Braun, or seeing if she can somehow reach Simon. “I don’t like any of this,” Richard tells her as he scrubs at his mug forcefully in the sink.

“That’s not new,” she says drily, nudging him with her hip until he takes her mug from her to wash as well. That kind of casual touch is still strange, but it’s less strange than bilocating into her bed in her old apartment. She hasn’t been in it since Geneva. She’d used some of her savings to buy new clothes and had her laptop, phone, and recorder with her, so there hadn’t been a desperate need to bicker with the police about the caution tape or to try to pretend that she didn’t see the shadowy figures clawing at her walls. Still, having the conversation about this strange and murky _after_ had been hard, made harder still by not feeling able to reach across the table and touch him, and given that Richard had bilocated right along with her, he’d felt the same. Her head had swam with the dizzying realization of what they’d done, and then--

“Alex?”

It’s not bilocating, but it might as well be. She can see the walls of her bedroom--they looked _scorched_ , burnt and yet somehow rotten still, warping and twisting under her eyes. She can see the shadows peeling themselves out of the depths and stretching into figures with long, spindly fingers and wide, dripping grins. She can see Richard--rather, she can see the hellish facsimile he’d _become_ , that same demonic shade with impossible starry eyes who’d watched her from the corner in Nic’s house. She knows if she turns her head, she’ll see her own reflection in the standing mirror in the corner, and she knows she’ll see herself contorted the same way: too many joints, too-long limbs, all of her swallowed by shadows and teeth and stars.

She drags in a heavy breath. “I’m here.” She leans against him, the fabric of his henley soft against her cheek. “What happens to the clothes we were wearing?” she asks idly. “The...other versions of us. Bilocated us. I was in my pajamas, but I’m in my normal clothes now. You had a Yale shirt on, but now you’re in green. Is there like...some pocket dimension somewhere? Like some psychic closet or something?”

“We’ve averted the end of the world and are struggling with involuntarily bilocating,” Richard says, “and you’re wondering about the physics of clothing?”

“It’s either that or actually talk about your father,” she points out, “and since I’ve had more luck getting a straight answer out of Simon than getting you to talk about Howard over the past three years…”

He sighs and turns off the faucet, then sets her mug in the sink. “I’ve talked about my father before.”

“Not like this.”

He grips the edge of the sink and takes a deep breath, then another. “So a closet dimension, you said?”

“Richard.”

He turns and wraps his arms around her; she sinks against him. _This is here. This is now. This is real._ “I didn’t want to be apart from you,” he says after a long moment.

Stars gather on his skin beneath her cheek. She can feel them prickle even through his shirt. “You mean earlier, when we were in my room? And here?”

“I...it didn’t feel right to reach out to you. To ask you for comfort.” His grip tightens around her. “Not when this was one more thing I’d put in your path. I don’t deserve to--”

“I stopped bilocating when you called to me.” She feels him still and chances a glance up into his face. For all the stars in his skin, his eyes are undeniably his, clear and blue and not at all dotted with the universe. “Earlier today. When you got too embarrassed because you’d propositioned me and left. You called to me, remember? And I came to you.”

“Oh,” he says softly.

“Yes,” she agrees. “ _Oh._ So don’t act like you’re ruining my life, Richard Strand. I got involved in this all on my own.”

He starts to fuss at that, but she fixes him with a look until he sighs and drops it. “My point,” he says finally, “is that it’s...easier to be present when you’re here. When I--when _we_ \--can touch. It does seem like it started when we came back to Seattle but were sleeping separately.”

“You mean when you were at Nic’s.”

“Yes.” His voice is gentle, almost as if he’s afraid she’ll bolt. “And when I was here.”

"That sounds an awful lot like something you didn't want to talk about."

"I know what you saw, Alex."

Her fingers tighten in his shirt. "I didn't see anything."

"Aren't I supposed to be the liar?" He takes a deep breath. "I know, because I saw it, too. I saw you."

She starts to shake, and she hates it--they faced down more horrors than she had ever attempted to fathom, and yet knowing that he had seen her turn into that same sort of monster rattles her more completely than any of Warren's machinations. "Please tell me I'm still human--I'm still _me_."

"You're still you." His response is immediate and steady, and some of the panic subsides. "And I'm still me. We just..."

"...need help." She takes a deep breath, then steps carefully out of the circle of his arms to busy herself at the sink with her mug. "We should call Tannis," she says as she scrubs needlessly at it. He's already washed it, and she knows that, but it's something to do with her hands that isn't trying to claw off her own skin. "I don't know where Simon even is anymore, honestly. I don't think he's been in Three Rivers in some time. Unless you think your father has something hidden in here that we haven't found yet, Tannis is probably our best bet."

Richard reaches out and covers her hands with his. "Alex--"

"I really don't want to talk about what we saw right now, Richard." She scrubs harder, jostling his grip. "I want to do something because we've already saved the world, and I'm tired, and I--"

The mug slips out of her hands and shatters against the steel sink, and the next thing she knows, she's curled up on the floor, crying and keening in such a way that all of Richard's reassurances that she's still human seem empty.

"I'll call Braun," he tells her, letting her crawl into his lap and cling to him as he sinks down next to her. "And then we'll see about Simon. Perhaps Braun knows how to get ahold of your pet murderer, since he claims to be psychic."

She's too rattled to rise to the jibe. "Are you sure your father didn't leave anything?" she asks haltingly.

He's quiet for too long. In the desperate clarity of panic and fear, she sees the motes of dust in the air dance in the filtered sunlight and the starlight from his skin. He's still, with only the fluttering of his pulse to belie the idea that he might be carved from stone. Even though it's just the two of them, just two in one space, not two in two spaces, not shadows and reflections and tricks of the mind, she can't shake the feeling that the house is breathing, watching, grieving.

"I'll call Braun," he repeats. "And then we'll see."

* * * * *

Braun picks up on the second ring. "Some psychic," Richard mutters, and Alex has just enough presence of mind to poke him in the ribs for his comment.

“Put the phone on speaker,” she hisses at him, and while he rolls his eyes at her, he does it anyway and sets the phone on the table in front of them.

“Richard! What a surprise!” comes Braun’s cheery golden voice. “I was expecting your call a few hours ago.”

“You could have called yourself,” Richard grumbles. 

Alex pokes him in the ribs again. “Tannis! Hi!”

“And Alex!” Braun does sound entirely too chipper, but at this point, she’s pretty sure she’ll take chipper over apocalyptic. “You’re in one place, I see.”

It shouldn’t surprise her that the man already seems to know what’s going on, but it does, which is, in its way, oddly reassuring. “Yes,” she says. “We both are. I guess you know what we’ve been dealing with?”

“I have some idea, yes,” Braun responds, “but I’d rather hear it from both of you.”

 _From both of you._ Alex glances over at Richard, seated next to her on the couch in his living room in their usual research spots. His arm over her shoulders is new, but necessary; it keeps her grounded, and when she slips her arm around his waist and feels him trembling, she knows it keeps him grounded, too. “Well, we stopped Warren,” Alex offers. “So...yay?”

“Yay, indeed,” Braun agrees. “But that’s not why you called.”

Richard sighs, bristles. “What do you know about involuntary bilocation?”

“And straight to the point as always, Richard.” Some of the warmth vanishes from Braun’s voice. “So you don’t mean to bilocate, then? It’s just been happening?”

“Ever since we got back to Seattle,” he confirms, and Alex holds him tighter; while his voice doesn’t waver, a tremor begins to work its way up his spine. “When we were in Geneva, nothing happened.”

“Other than undoing Warren’s work, I presume.”

“Yes.” 

“And it only began when you got back to your father’s house?”

Richard pauses and looks down at Alex. “I believe so, yes,” he says after a moment. “We were together for the first several hours here, but we thought…”

“...we thought we should try to spend some time apart,” Alex says. She can’t look away from him. The stars under his skin are dim and still, and in spite of the henley, he looks more like the man she’d known before than he has in days. “After everything in Geneva and two months in a Swiss hospital with no visitors we knew...I mean, I didn’t want him to get tired of me.”

“I don’t think I could,” Richard says, quite simply, and she blushes.

“So we tried for a couple of days to spend some time apart. He told Nic he needed some space, so he was here, and I was staying at Nic’s, but this morning--” There’s nothing but patient silence on the other end of the phone line, but she has to remind herself that Tannis probably can’t hear her blushing more. “--this morning, I went to the office to try to work, but I also woke up in Richard’s bed with him.”

Braun’s voice is gentle. “This wasn’t the first time you bilocated, though, was it?”

Richard takes a deep breath and looks to her for support. She nods for him to continue. “It wasn’t,” he confirms. “The first night we were back, I was at Nic’s, too, and Alex was here.”

“What do you think that means?”

She can feel how stiff Richard gets, how much it rankles him to be not only vulnerable but also vulnerable to the man he can no longer decry as a phony, but he answers anyway. “It’s happened when we’ve been apart, either in separate rooms or separate places.” A beat; he traces faint circles against her shoulder before he continues. “When we feel like we can’t touch. Then…”

Fascinated, she watches him go pink at the ears. “Then we end up in bed together,” she supplies, and on the other end of the phone line, Tannis Braun laughs.

“I hardly think this...this _predicament_ is that amusing,” Richard snaps.

“If you can’t laugh during sex or in the face of adversity, then when can you?” Braun replies brightly, ignoring how Richard splutters. Alex smothers a desperate giggle against his sleeve. Apparently untroubled, Tannis continues. “I don’t know if sex would help, of course, but what I think is happening is your gifts asking for intimacy. Connection. Making order out of chaos is hard work, particularly when you don’t have a solid practice to build on. When you disrupted Warren’s work--”

\-- _stars, teeth, blood, music, fury_ \--

“--you filtered all the chaos he would have wanted to unleash on the world through yourselves. You both have gifts, yes, but even the most refined of them wouldn’t be able to handle the sheer power of Tiamat. Primordial, _caged_...when She was freed, I doubt She knew the full extent of what She could do.”

\-- _scales, stars, scars, screaming, pain like every cell in her head was on fire_ \--

“Your father tried to both groom and repress those gifts in you, Richard.” Braun sounds impossibly kind. “He knew something like this would happen. He’s left something for you, but you need to find it.”

“This isn’t about him, or me.” In contrast, Richard’s voice is ice. “I refuse to let Alex be collateral again. I don’t have time to play hide-and-seek with my father’s attempts at recompense for a lifetime of abuse and abandonment. We need a solution _now._ ”

“It’s all connected, Strand.”

\-- _shadows dancing, stars going out, nebulae blooming in her ribs_ \--

It takes a moment for the speaker to register: not on the phone line, not quite in the room, young and weary and almost insubstantial. There’s a crackling pause, then a sigh.

“Simon, we agreed,” Braun says quietly. “You’re too weak right now. They can do this on their own.”

“Simon?” Alex interjects. “What are you doing with Tannis?”

“It’s all connected, and it has been from the start. You know it is.” No one seems surprised when Simon keeps talking and ignores her question. _Cryptic keeps its own time_ , Alex thinks, but that thought is interrupted. “It’s always been about you, Strand, but it’s always been about Alex, too. You invited her into the center. She took the steps and let the light in.”

\-- _searing light, feeling her body break and reform, scrambling for Richard’s hand, bones snapping_ \--

“So it’s my fault,” Richard says.

“Yes,” answers Simon. His voice grows wearier; they can hear Braun’s sotto voce worry even as Simon plows on. “And no. You need to think about what you did.”

“With Warren?”

A tap, a pause, then two taps, and it’s hard to remember that she’s in Richard’s living room, that they’re on the phone with a psychic he’ll no longer deny and a murderer who did all he knew how to do. “I did what I knew how to do,” Richard says. “There’s nothing complex about it. I couldn’t let Warren unleash Tiamat, and I couldn’t let Alex die. Is that what you mean?”

A tap. 

“Simon, you’re fading,” Braun murmurs. A flurry of taps is the response. “No, don’t argue--we agreed that I’d look after you until they fixed this. I can _see_ you fading, and if they need you--”

\-- _is this what it felt like? The first time Apsu and Tiamat met? It’s less about skin to skin, more how her veins throb in time with his heartbeat, more how his lungs fill with her breath, more how the stars birthed in his eyes draw forth the ones that crowd her mouth until everything is light and beginning and an infinity of ends_ \--

“Why can’t you just _help?_ ” Richard demands, but there’s no anger, only despair. “Is this just a game to you? Haven’t we done enough?”

Two taps, two taps, two taps, a scuffle on the other end, then a faint “use mine” from Braun, then:

" _This the man, all tattered and torn, who kissed the maiden all forlorn, who milked the cow with the crumpled horn that tossed the dog that worried the cat that killed the rat that ate the malt that lay in the house that Jack built._ " Simon’s voice comes through the line louder than before, steadied by Braun’s running beneath it like a current. “It’s all connected, Strand. You’ve pulled the threads but haven’t undone the knot. You have to undo it before it undoes you.”

\-- _and then stillness. Stars fading as the sun rises. She meets his eyes. An unspoken question: did we do it? Two taps on the inside of her skull, dismissed as a headache. Two taps, and a whisper:_

“Not yet.”

* * * * *

Richard doesn’t speak for the next two hours, but he doesn’t turn away from her, either, which she’s pretty sure is progress. Instead, he stretches out on the couch and lets her stretch out mostly on top of him in an inelegant tangle of limbs underneath the heavy afghan he keeps slung over the back. It’s quiet, but the stars grow brighter on their skin until the walls and ceiling are dappled with slow streams of light.

“I thought it would hurt my eyes, but it doesn’t,” Alex says finally. “The stars, I mean.”

He makes a little murmur of agreement. 

“When everything was happening--with Tiamat, I mean--we weren’t ourselves. Not completely.” She shifts on him; his fingers find purchase on her hips, dipping between the hem of her shirt and her skin. His touch is warm. She’s not entirely sure why that surprises her still. “I felt like I was stars. I think I was. It looks like I still am. Or...or was that just me?”

He taps twice on her hips.

“Richard.” She doesn’t look at him; that would mean moving from where she has her face half-buried into the crook of his neck, and she doesn’t know if she’ll disappear if she stops touching him as much as she can. “Don’t pull a Simon. Talk to me. Please.”

He sighs; she rises with his inhale, sinks with his exhale.

“You’re going to have to talk to me eventually,” she says. “I don’t know what we’re looking for, but I _will_ tear this house apart. I’m not going to let it take me, whatever it is. I won’t let it take you, either.” Resolve sounds easy in her voice, but it’s taken most of these past two hours to put it there. “Everything is connected, which means you and I, we’re connected, too.”

There’s another long pause before he sighs again and speaks. “We’ve been connected from the start.”

“We have,” she agrees, “and that’s not going to stop now because you don’t want to talk about things. Assigning blame doesn’t help us here. If anything, this is your father’s fault. It’s not yours.”

“ _This is the man, all tattered and torn,_ ” he notes. “It’s hard not to see it as my fault.”

“Well, I’m no maiden and haven’t been for a long time,” she points out, “so I think we can move on from taking a children’s nursery rhyme at face value.”

“I should have kissed you.”

She jerks upright and stares, her arms braced on either side of him. He looks back up at her evenly. Stars swirl on his cheeks, their light faintly pink with his blush, but his eyes are cool and steady. “I should have kissed you,” he repeats. “Before all of this even began. I should have back in Los Gatos, when we both wanted it, before I knew--before things got _complicated._ ”

“Why,” she asks, “are you telling me this now?”

“Because,” he says, “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know what my father might have hidden, I don’t know how to stop what’s happening, and all I want to do right now is kiss you, but the timing...well, it couldn’t be worse, now, could it?”

“I don’t know.” She’s breathless, because while being in two places at once is a definite challenge to her grasp on reality, Richard is decidedly concrete beneath her, and that’s almost harder to accept. “I mean--we could be in front of Warren and Tiamat. That’s probably worse timing, right?”

The stars glow brighter on his skin, spearing the shadows on the walls. The shadows stretch and contort, growing limbs, growing faces, growing teeth. “I did then, too,” he says, and she can feel the light burst out of her where his hands are on her hips. When she looks up, she can see her shadow twist and elongate. “I wanted to touch you,” he goes on, “and I wanted to tear Warren’s throat out for daring to put his hands on you first.”

Her shadow bares its teeth at her and snarls. She whimpers; her fingers dig into the upholstery of the couch. “Richard--”

“That was too much, wasn’t it?” His tone starts out light, but then he stops and looks at her, _really_ looks, and immediately struggles to sit upright without toppling her over. “Alex? Alex, stay with me, Alex, Alex, please don’t go--”

 _Now_ the light hurts. Her eyes water, but she can’t look away from her shadow; she feels frozen, worse than her nightmare on the sleep notes, worse than any time they’ve watched any tape because now it’s _real_ , it’s real and it’s her and when she stretches out her hand to push away the shadow’s seeking fingers, her own fingers stretch and contort and bloom with stars, and all she can smell is ozone and, strangely, _heat_ , dry desert heat that drags nails down her throat--

\--and she’s boneless, shaking, her ears are ringing, Richard is shouting, there’s sand underneath her, and the ground is going to swallow her completely if she doesn’t reach out, and she _does_ , and her arms keep growing longer and longer, and all around her is the sand and an ancient night sky so studded with galaxies that it looks like a mouth filled with teeth ready to tear her apart--

“Tell me I’m still me,” she begs, and the here and now flickers between the sensation of drowning, of being buried. “Richard, _please_ \--tell me I’m still _me_ , tell me I’m still human--”

Somehow his eyes pierce through everything, cool and blue and filled with enough tears to make an ocean of their own. “You’re beautiful,” he manages. “You’re--Alex, you’re beautiful, come back, please come back--” 

All around her, the universe spins, galaxies sliding over each other like a snake uncoiling to strike. She sees caves, painted. She sees a dry expanse, vast, familiar, punctuated with mountains, a mesa. She sees the shadows, the stars, and she blinks, tears scorching down her face, and sees Richard, and the living room in his father’s house, and no stars, no impossible shadows, just the man himself, his hands pressed to her cheeks.

“Are you here?” he whispers, his voice broken, and at that, she breaks, too.

* * * * *

He makes her tea later--peppermint, no caffeine, with only a little honey, nothing that would make her heart race any more--and herds her to the study. She follows him shadow-close, her hand tight in his. It had made making tea difficult, but for once, he’s not running off and leaving her, so she doesn’t comment. He urges her into the big plush armchair, then perches awkwardly on the arm.

She sighs and rests her cheek against his ribs. “I’m fine, Richard.”

“You were _gone._ ”

“That doesn’t mean I’m not fine.” She pauses. “Well, I’m fine _now._ ”

He huffs, but even though she can feel his anxiety coiling off him, he still runs his fingers through her hair gently. “You saw something.” It’s a statement, not a question, and she nods. “Will you tell me?”

“Stars, mostly.” She leans into his ministrations, and the last lingering concerns about propriety vanish when he absently lets his touch drift over her cheekbone. She tilts her head, presses a bare kiss to his fingertips, and figures she’ll explain that when he explains the forehead kiss from earlier. “Shadows. Teeth.”

“Was that all?”

“No.” She makes a little grabby gesture for the tea, which he obligingly hands to her. “I saw...caves, I think. A desert, or something like it. It looked familiar.”

“Familiar, how? Like you’d been there before?”

It’s not easy to think on it. She takes a careful sip to brace herself. “I think so. Maybe...maybe it was Urraca Mesa? I don’t know why I’d have seen it, but…”

“...but you saw the mesa.” He shifts a little on the arm of the chair. “So let’s go over what we know. We’re bilocating, and it started when we returned to Seattle.”

“Because you have separation anxiety.”

He scoffs, then pauses. “I--that was a joke, wasn’t it?”

“In bad taste, I’m sure.” She tilts her face up to his and tries to grin. “I know you’re a big boy and can handle being on your own.”

“Yes, well.” He clears his throat. “We began bilocating when we tried to separate. You’re seeing things-- _I’m_ seeing things. There are stars beneath our skin. Both Braun and Simon assert that everything is connected.”

“Tannis said that there might be a part of us trying to make order out of chaos,” she points out. “That we were filters for Tiamat’s power. Do you think we’re just...vessels, I guess? That Tiamat is in us, all dressed up in meatsuits with no place to go?”

He looks a little queasy at that, a sentiment she echoes. “I don’t think that’s quite it. The shadows--the figures that you saw, rather--they looked familiar. We’ve seen them before.”

“The Tall Paul,” she supplies.

Richard nods. “With your seeing the mesa, and now with the shadows…”

“The totems.”

He nods again. “They had fallen. Uvela said that, according to local lore, they had been erected to keep the enemies out of this world. It’s difficult to...well, I suppose I can’t say that anymore, given everything we’ve been through, but...I don’t think it’s too great a conjecture at this point to wonder if perhaps that’s part of the reason we’re seeing these...these _echoes_.”

Alex is silent for a moment, turning thoughts over in her head, and after a breath, Richard resumes running his hand through her hair. “If everything is connected,” she says at last, “like the caves are--remember? There were paintings in the caves at Urraca Mesa that matched the ones in Bath--then...then do we need to make _new_ totems? Here? The axis mundi was here, Richard. Not Mount Ararat. _Here._ ”

“I wouldn’t know how to start that,” he admits. “My father was more interested in the patriarchal cult side of things and less in creating relics. Braun was correct when he said that my father was both grooming and repressing my gifts; I learned my skepticism from him, yes, but in doing so, he…he taught me how to stretch my mind, as well. It’s how I found Bobby Maimes. It’s how I tried to find Coralee. I can _find_ things, Alex, but I can’t _make_ them.”

“So...can you find what your father hid for you?”

His hand stills in her hair.

“Richard, I know you don’t want to. I know that your father is--look, I know that it’s hard to face your ghosts.” All of those times that he’d left her, all those words he’d said to her that had more in common with winter than a man: she knows in a way that is different but still acute how much love and anger can exist in the same heart. “But I think it’s the only option you have. That _we_ have. I don’t want you to become a shadow, too.”

He stands abruptly and starts pacing, and the edges of him begin to flicker. A cold knot of fear coils in her stomach. “We’re _done_ with what my father did,” he snaps. “We finished his work--the work he foisted off on me because he didn’t care enough about his family to take responsibility for what he’d done. We’re _done_ , Alex.”

“Clearly we’re not,” she says quietly. “If we were done, you wouldn’t be…” She pauses. It’s not something she’s tried to do, not something she’d ever imagined she could do, but Nic had joked about her Strand Beacon before, and that was _without_ the remnants of Tiamat in her. She sits still in the chair, but another her stands and crosses over to him, brushes her fingertips over his blurred edges, blinks, and then is somewhere else.

“Wouldn’t be what?” Richard demands, and the hot winds almost rip his words out of his throat.

The gravel is hot underneath her bare feet, but she tries to ignore it, reaching out for his hand anyway. “You wouldn’t be here and there,” she says. “You went to the mesa instead of talking to me about Howard.”

In the study, he turns to her, sitting as she is still in the chair. “Did you expect any better?”

“It’s not about better.” She holds out her mug in an unspoken invitation, not wavering until he sighs and walks over to take it from her. “It’s about different, Richard. The definition of insanity is doing the same thing and expecting a different result, and you’re the least crazy person I know.”

He scoffs. “That’s hardly a compliment.”

“Well, you’re kind of being an asshole right now, so you don’t get the best ones.” She wraps her arms around his waist, feeling the way his shirt sticks to his skin from sweat. “It doesn’t mean I love you less. It means you should think about what you’re saying, that’s all.”

He almost drops the mug. “You--”

She shakes her head. “We’ll talk about it after we figure this out, okay? I’ve already panicked about it, and you’ve already panicked about it, so we need to find a solution. What do you think your father hid for you?”

Richard shields his eyes from the New Mexico sun. For a long time, he’s quiet, but she knows him and can see the thoughts whirling in his head. “I think,” he says finally, “you’re right about the totems. I think we need to go to the cave.”

“I can’t call John Uvela like this,” she protests. “He’s going to wonder how the hell we got all the way out here in bare feet and bumming-around-the-house clothes. And I’m _not_ walking.”

With a tilted grin, Richard sets the mug down on the desk behind him, then takes both of her hands in his. “Do you trust me?”

“I went to the end of the world with you,” she points out, but the little smile he gives her goes a long way towards chasing the fear from her bones. “I think that means I trust you.”

“Then picture the cave for me.”

To anyone else, he would sound confident, practiced, assured, and she knows this, but more than that, she knows _him_ , and she knows he’s taking a leap of faith. She closes her eyes and remembers the cave, high on the cliff, with its unnerving petrographs that gave her the feeling of being in two places at once. It echoes with her now, standing in the study with Richard’s hands wrapped around hers, standing in the Philmont Scout Ranch with bare feet and her arms around his waist. She can feel the still, oppressive air in the study. She can feel the sharp heated wind through the mesa. Behind her eyes are galaxies and primitive cave paintings, melding together until there is nothing but a beginning blooming out of a thousand ends, and then Richard’s soft exhalation.

“Oh,” he says as she opens her eyes to the cool darkness of the cave. “That was...easier than I expected.”

“You mean the bilocating? Trilocating? How many places are we in, now?” Her head is spinning, but it’s a welcome respite from the heat. 

“I think just two.” He takes a step closer to the petrographs, studying the figures that had haunted her so badly with an academic eye. “I don’t think we’re down on the ranch anymore. I don’t feel like I am. I feel like I’m here and in the study.”

She nods towards the desk and flops back down in the armchair. “Your tea’s going to get cold.”

“ _Your_ tea,” he corrects, but he turns away from the cave wall to walk deeper into the cave proper. “I made it to help ground you, seeing as you very nearly dissolved in my arms. Hardly the way I wanted you to do that, you know.”

Alex, both versions of herself, raises an eyebrow. “Is your post-apocalyptic impulse always going to be to make innuendos at me, or is this just a holiday?”

“I’m allowed to approach childhood trauma with some degree of levity as a coping mechanism.”

“Of course you are,” she allows. “What are you looking for?”

“It’s here,” he says as he goes through the desk drawers and through the rocks in a nook in the cave. “I don’t know what it _is_ , exactly, but it’s here.”

“What does it feel like?” In spite of everything, she can’t turn off her instinctive curiosity. “Is it a pull, like a magnet, or…?”

Richard sighs and sits back on his haunches for a moment. “Alex, I’m trying to work.”

“And you left me without my phone or my recorder or anything else to do but bother you.” She grins, and it feels almost natural. 

He laughs; for a moment, they could be at the studio, going over interview footage, discussing the latest intern gossip, mock-arguing over where to go for dinner. “What did you say about insanity?” he almost teases before the smile on his face goes pensive. “You asked what it feels like--when I’m trying to find something.”

“Yes.”

“When someone calls you,” he says, “and keeps calling, and keeps calling--you start to recognize their number, don’t you?”

She nods.

“And after a time, you develop a kind of rapport with it.” He turns back to the rocks, carefully moving a pile of them to investigate beneath. “With them, even, in spite of having never met them face to face. If you’re of a more romantic mind, you fall in love with them a little, the same way you may fall in love with a stranger you see on the train when all they are is the small amount you can glean from watching them and the hope you have of who they could be. 

“And then…” He tugs hard at the bottom drawer, one she knows sticks. “Then you _meet_ that person who’s been calling, or you watch that person get up to get off the train, and somehow the motion of them, the way they come to life in front of you is terrifying and exhilarating, and you wonder for a moment if you’d rather get hit by lightning or say hello. An uncertain future suddenly strikes you, and you’re more afraid than you’ve ever been in your life of a very persistent woman with a smile that seems designed to undo you and a list of professional accomplishments that definitely could.

“But you can’t let it go all day. Not after they get off the train. Not after they leave your office, even though they make up a very thin excuse to come back again.” He lifts a pile of papers out of the desk drawer and then carefully knocks on the bottom, then makes a tiny triumphant sound. “There’s one of those terrible little metal bookmarks on that shelf over there--would you mind?”

“You asked the wrong me,” she notes, and he looks up from the pile of rocks, startled. “But yes, I’ll get it for you. What were you saying?”

“About you very obviously lying to get my attention?” he asks.

She fetches the bookmark and thwaps it against the desk until he takes it from her. “I think you were trying to tell me you love me, even though that’s _not_ what I asked you.”

“Yes, well, it _is_ what you asked me.” One version of him works the bookmark underneath what she can only assume is a false bottom in the drawer; the other version of him moves aside another rock with a little grunt. “Because finding something feels like that same moment I realized my future was going to be shaped by the fact that I was falling in love with you.” He pushes aside one more rock, then pauses and looks back at her. “Finding something feels inevitable,” he says softly. “It feels like spinning and spinning until you find true north. It feels like knowing there is something out there for you, that you can complete the thing and be completed by it in the same breath. It feels the way I do every time you come into the room, when every nerve I have cannot settle until I know where you are. Finding something feels like knowing exactly why I looked a madman and a goddess in the face and told them _not today._ So yes, Alex...that’s exactly what you asked me.” 

He breaks off and frowns, and she pushes aside the warmth blooming in her to peer over his shoulder at the pile of rocks in the cave. “That doesn’t look natural,” she says, pointing at a fist-sized fragment deeply scored with geometric carvings.

“It doesn’t,” he agrees, reaching out for it--

\--and there is the sensation of being pushed through a crowd at warp speed, her breath catching in her lungs, and then stillness.

He blinks. She blinks. They’re in the study, their feet filthy from the cave, and Richard has what she can only assume is a chunk of a totem in his hand. “I guess that means you found it,” she says, a little stunned.

“Yes,” he says, just as stunned-sounding as he holds up both the totem chunk and a parchment envelope. “I did.”

* * * * *

It takes awhile to get settled after that; for as purposeful as this bilocation was, it still disoriented them both as badly as the initial, involuntary one that morning, and Richard gives up on the idea of no more caffeine to make them both a cup of coffee. The totem is placed in the center of the kitchen table next to the envelope; as he sets down two mugs and comes to sit next to her, he stares at them both with no small amount of trepidation.

“It’s going to be okay,” she says. “It’s just a letter.”

“It’s something from my father,” he argues. “There’s never anything _just_ about those.”

She hums noncommittally and takes a drink of coffee before threading her fingers through his. “I’m not going anywhere, you know.”

He’s quiet for several breaths, then he squeezes her hand in return. “I’m not, either. Not anymore.”

“Good,” she says, not even bothering to hide how _light_ that makes her feel, how giddy, how dizzy. “Now open the damn envelope.”

That earns a huffy laugh from him, and he lets go of her hand to open the envelope gingerly. It’s old, at least forty years, and that realization punctures some of the giddiness. His name is scrawled across the front in handwriting that so closely resembles his, she has to do a double-take.

“Of course he hid it in the desk,” Richard mutters. “He can’t be straightforward about _anything_...” But he trails off as he tugs out a letter, goes almost still again as he reads, and then, with a sigh, he lowers it enough so that she can read it, too.

_Richard,_

_I am not a good man. You’re young enough still that you may think there is something good in me, but that is, I think, overshadowed by the things I have done._

_You don’t know Thomas yet. I hope that you won’t know him; he is charismatic, knowledgeable, and powerful, and I’ve already sacrificed too much of you to him. You have gifts, and he wants more from you than your mother will let me give him. More than I should let him take from you, to be fair, but I am not a good man, nor am I a strong one. This is all I know to give you now._

_If you are reading this, then you have, in some way, tapped into your potential as the Mantle of the Dragon. It is an honor and a burden, and I both hope and despair that you have shouldered it. Thomas is crafty, and I can only imagine that he is trying to twist your gifts into a tool for his own use. He has had me weaken the totems holding back the veil--if I were to guess, I would say that he has had you destroy them completely. Regardless of whether you have, it is imperative that you rebuild them. It will solidify the barrier between our worlds, and it will keep the worst of his chaos at bay._

“Your father,” Alex says thoughtfully, eyeballing the amount pages and mentally calculating how much of them must be filled with a distinct lack of apologies, “was a _massive_ dick.”

Startled, Richard barks a laugh, then thumbs through the rest of the papers. “Oh, he’s listed a ritual,” he notes. “And it takes…” He pauses, counting the pages theatrically. “Yes, three pages to complete, calls for a Babylonian relic I don’t think we could get without a heist, and uses both ancient Sumerian _and_ Latin.” He laughs again, a little desperately, dropping the letter to the table. “This was supposed to be the _answer_ , Alex. It was supposed to keep you safe, keep you _here_ instead of being spun off into stars. It was supposed to…” He trails off, then sighs and reaches out again for her hand.

“It was supposed to be enough,” he says quietly. “ _I_ was supposed to be enough. And now there’s just...something else. One more thing. I just wanted to be done.”

Silently, Alex tucks herself against his side; after a moment, he lets go of her hand again so he can wrap his arm around her. She picks up the letter and leafs through it as he breathes in and out, slowly and carefully. He’s right: the bulk of the rest of it are instructions for a ritual that seems way beyond necessary, given everything they’re going through, and in the end, Howard doesn’t even sign off with anything other than a hurried _H._

“Your father being an asshole isn’t your fault, you know.” She flips back to what she can only think of as the abstract for the ritual, skimming it again. _Spirit, freely given. A bond, freely given. Chant over the silver vessel._ “I’m sure he loved you, but he didn’t know how to balance not being a massive jerk with saving the world and loving his family. That’s not on you.”

_To anchor the Dragon, you must create totems._

“It’s not,” he agrees numbly, “but he expected me to carry out his work, and I...I _can’t_ , Alex. Not anymore. I don’t know if I can do this ritual he’s prescribed and still keep you safe.”

_You must make the choice to anchor the Dragon._

She frowns and flips through the rest of the abstract, checking the language as an idea takes root. “I don’t think you have to,” she says finally.

He stares at her. “What?”

“Look.” She points to the abstract, then pauses and considers. “Well, I mean, I obviously don’t think you have to do anything Howard wanted you to, because he’s a fool who didn’t know how to be a good person. But no, look here. I don’t think the ritual is necessary. Not for us. Not after what we went through.”

“What do you mean?”

“I don’t think Howard understood what it meant to stand for this world,” she tells him. “For this world, or for anyone in it. He didn’t know how to stand for his family. For you, when you love so hard it aches.” Carefully, she places the letter next to the totem piece on the table before she turns in his arms to face him more fully. “Howard understood people the way Warren understood Tiamat: destructive, vengeful, and chaotic. But she’s a creation goddess, too, who built the universe out of love. She took vengeance out of grief.” She looks at him, the gray in his hair, the silvery scar at his temple, the way the years and the hurt and the lies have dug claws into his heart and not let go. “You don’t have to do that. I think...I think we can just _choose_ to make the totems. To _be_ the totems, if we have to. The ritual--it’s just trappings, made up by men who don’t understand what it’s like to love something so hard it tears you apart.”

She reaches up and traces her fingers against his cheek and is rewarded when some of the tension flows out of him like water. “I think we can _choose_ to work on moving forward,” she tells him. “We can choose who we are. We can choose to face things instead of trying to run away from them. It doesn’t have to be easy, Richard, and I don’t think it will be. But you don’t have to be alone.” 

He reaches up for her hand, and she folds her fingers through his again before bringing their joined hands to rest against her heart. “I choose you, Richard,” she says, and the stars in her sing in time with his heartbeat and her own. “Every time. And you can choose me, if you want. We can bury the totem in the backyard and tell the universe that we’ve done enough either way, and we’ve got enough leftover goddess in us that I think it might listen.”

In a moment that immediately preserves itself in amber memory, she watches Richard go through grief, hope, and resolve in the space of a breath, and when he settles finally on love, when she sees him make the choice he hadn’t been afforded before, she understands what he meant when he told her about what finding things felt like. “Bury the totem in the backyard?” he repeats. “Shall we invite Braun and your pet murderer over to help? He could bring an axe. Cut a hole in the latticework so we can bury it under the porch. Ruby will absolutely kill him for ruining her remodeling, mind you, but I’m not sure what effect the metaphysical anchor for the otherwise destructive power of a chaos goddess has on the resale value of a home.”

“It might be good for Simon,” she points out with a laugh that comes easier than it has in three years. “Get him out of the house a bit.”

Richard sobers for a moment. “He was with Braun--you said you saw him in your apartment, on that tape. He...didn’t look like himself. He looked like us. When we were shadows, that is.”

“He did.” She takes a steadying breath. “But I think...I think doing this will help him, too. Not just us. We don’t know what all Warren did, but I think he did something to Simon, too, and if we undo it, even just this little bit...it ripples outward, you know? Undo the knot at the center, and there’s more slack to undo the knots at the edges. If this is what we choose to do--what you choose to do, what I choose to do--then…”

“...then it will help.” He smiles crookedly. “ _This is the farmer, sowing his corn, that kept the cock that crowed in the morn, who woke the priest all shaved and shorn_ , et cetera.”

“It’s all connected.” She squeezes his hand, and he squeezes back. “You and me, at the center of things, yes?”

The shadows lift, and Richard smiles. “You and me. Together. Yes.” There’s lightness enough in his eyes that she can’t help but lean forward to kiss him, and it is as easy as if she’s always done it and delightful enough that she immediately kisses him again. 

“Your father’s still a jerk,” she tells him when they manage to part. “But you’re not Howard.”

“I’m not,” he agrees. 

“And we’ll bury the totem in the backyard and figure out how to put all this...this weird stuff in it. Because we choose to be totems. Us against the world.”

“We will,” he says.

“And then,” she says, grinning rather wickedly at him until he pinks, “I’ll call Nic and tell him I _am_ taking that extended sabbatical, and we’ll exorcise this house the best way we can.”

“Are you suggesting,” he drawls in a clear attempt at suavity, “that we christen every room in this house to irritate any shade of my father left behind?”

“I’m _offering_ ,” she corrects him archly. “But the choice is yours.”

It’s his turn to lean forward and kiss her, and she melts into it. “I choose you, too, Alex,” he tells her. “From the end of the world and into what comes after. I didn’t know how to love this world enough to save it, but I...I knew how to love you enough, and that’s a start. I’ll find my way to it.” He kisses her again, deep, sweet, and in his affirmation--in hers, in theirs--she can feel her ragged edges solidify, can feel her stars settle, can feel his dawn break, and she knows they’ll make their way through this, too. “I’ll find my way back to you every time.”

**Author's Note:**

> There's a darker version of this floating around in my head, and a sillier one where Alex tells Howard's ghost to eff off, but honestly it's been a hard frickin' year, and I thought some fluff would be better.
> 
> Anyway, happy Fic-tide, Lydia! I hope you like this!
> 
> (Also, as always, a shoutout to my beloved @Aproclivity, for both organizing this exchange and also for putting up with me going "but does this make sense?????" at 3 AM. I love you, darling.)


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